Save the Greater Glider

The endangered greater glider is quite literally on the chopping block, with its habitat under threat by logging in state forests. Once common in the Queensland bush, devastating bushfires in 2019 wiped out much of its habitat and halved its population.

The species was uplisted to endangered in 2022, and there is now an urgent need to protect its remaining forest home.

Under current State Government plans to continue logging native state forests outside of southeast Queensland, greater glider populations in Queensland state forests are predicted to decline up to 70%. That's as good as a death sentence.

We need the Crisafulli Government to stop logging the greater glider's native forest habitat, fund a recovery plan to address the major threats to its survival, and expand key protected areas to enable its range to recover.

Save the greater glider and her forest home 

The greater glider is the largest of Australia's gliding possums, with a body up to 45cm long. It has huge fluffy ears and a long, beautiful tail up to 60cm long. Its gliding membrane goes from elbow to ankle, and it glides up to 100m. 

A nocturnal forest animal, the greater glider lives in the treetops, and like the koala it eats gum leaves from a selection of its favourite trees. It raises just one joey and once the young leave the pouch they stay in the hollow while mum forages, and sometimes travel on her back while she glides from tree to tree. 

Native forests are everything to the greater glider, but are under threat in Queensland. The greater glider needs big hollows, which are found in trees more than 150 years old and are in abundance in the gnarled old forest giants over 300 years old, of which few remain.

Supporters of the Protect Beautiful Queensland Week of Action held a Bioblitz plant and animal survey and discovered a Greater Glider in Deongwar State Forest, adding urgency to their call to protect the forest.

Industrial logging for more than 100 years has decimated the Queensland hollows resource in state-owned native forests. Foresters deliberately ringbarked and poisoned these 'apartment blocks' of the forest, and encouraged vigorous young timber-producing trees to take their place. Logging continues to have a disastrous effect on forest structure and habitat values for the greater glider, and has been mismanaged with timber production the primary focus, for too long.

If we act now to protect remaining forests, we can save this iconic Queenslander, the world's largest gliding possum.